THE TRIUMPH
OF THE
SCARLET PIMPERNEL
BY
BARONESS ORCZY
_Author of "Nicolette," "The First Sir Percy"
"Flower 'o the Lily," "The Scarlet
Pimpernel," etc._
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. "The Everlasting Stars Look Down"
II. Feet of Clay
III. The Fellowship of Grief
IV. One Dram of Joy Must Have a Pound of
Care
V. Rascality Rejoices
VI. One Crowded Hour of Glorious Life
VII. Two Interludes
VIII. The Beautiful Spaniard
IX. A Hideous, Fearful Hour
X. The Grim Idol that the World Adores
XI. Strange Happenings
XII. Chauvelin
XIII. The Fisherman's Rest
XIV. The Castaway
XV. The Nest
XVI. A Lover of Sport
XVII. Reunion
XVIII. Night and Morning
XIX. A Rencontre
XX. Departure
XXI. Memories
XXII. Waiting
XXIII. Mice and Men
XXIV. By Order of the State
XXV. Four Days
XXVI. A Dream
XXVII. Terror or Ambition
XXVIII. In the Meanwhile
XXIX. The Close of the Second Day
XXX. When the Storm Burst
XXXI. Our Lady of Pity
XXXII. Grey Dawn
XXXIII. The Cataclysm
XXXIV. The Whirlwind
THE TRIUMPH OF
THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL
CHAPTER I
"THE EVERLASTING STARS LOOK DOWN, LIKE GLISTENING
EYES BRIGHT WITH IMMORTAL PITT, OVER THE LOT OF
MAN."
§1
Nearly five years have gone by!
Five years, since the charred ruins of grim Bastille--stone image of
Absolutism and of Autocracy--set the seal of victory upon the expression
of a people's will and marked the beginning of that marvellous era of
Liberty and of Fraternity which has led us step by step from the
dethronement of a King, through the martyrdom of countless innocents, to
the tyranny of an oligarchy more arbitrary, more relentless, above all
more cruel, than any that the dictators of Rome or Stamboul ever dreamed
of in their wildest thirst for power. An era that sees a populace always
clamouring for the Millennium, which ranting demagogues have never
ceased to promise: a Millennium to be achieved alternatively through the
extermination of Aristocracy, of Titles, of Riches, and the abrogation
of Priesthood: through dethroned royalty and desecrated altars, through
an army without leadership, or an Assembly without power.
They have never ceased to prate, these frothy rhetoricians! And the
people went on, vaguely believing that one day, soon, that Millennium
would surely come, after seas of blood had purged the soil of France
from the last vestige of bygone oppression, and after her sons and
daughters had been massacred in their thousands and their tens of
thousands, until their headless bodies had built up a veritable scaling
ladder for the tottering feet of lustful climbers, and these in their
turn had perished to make way for other ranters, other speech-makers, a
new Demosthenes or long-tongued Cicero.
Inevitably these too perished, one by one, irrespective of their virtues
or their vices, their errors or their ideals: Vergniaud, the enthusiast,
and Desmoulins, the irresponsible; Barnave, the just, and Chaumette, the
blasphemer; Hébert, the carrion, and Danton, the power. All, all have
perished, one after the other: victims of their greed and of their
crimes--they and their adherents and their enemies. They slew and were
slain in their turn. They struck blindly, like raging beasts, most of
them for fear lest they too should be struck by beasts more furious than
they. All have perished; but not before their iniquities have for ever
sullied what might have been the most glorious page in the history of
France--her fight for Liberty. Because of these monsters--and of a truth
there were only a few--the fight, itself sublime in its ideals, noble in
its conception, has become abhorrent to the rest of mankind.
But they, arraigned at the bar of history, what have they to say, what
to show as evidence of their patriotism, the purity of their intentions?
On this day of April, 1794, year II of the New Calendar, eight thousand
men, women, and not a few children, are crowding the prisons of Paris to
overflowing. Four thousand heads have fallen under the guillotine in the
past three months. All the great names of France, her noblesse, her
magistracy, her clergy, members of past Parliaments, shining lights in
the sciences, the arts, the Universities, men of substance, poets,
brain-workers, have been torn from their homes, their churches or their
places of refuge, dragged before a travesty of justice, judged,
condemned and slaughtered; not singly, not individually, but in
batches--whole families, complete hierarchies, entire households; one
lot for the crime of being rich, another for being nobly born; some
because of their religion, others because of professed free-thought. One
man for devotion to his friend, another for perfidy; one for having
spoken, another for having held his tongue, and another for no crime at
all--just because of his family connexions, his profession or his
ancestry.
For months it had been the innocents; but since then it has also been
the assassins. And the populace, still awaiting the Millennium, clamour
for more victims and for more--for the aristocrat and for the
sans-culotte, and howl with execration impartially at both.
§2
But through this mad orgy of murder and of hatred, one man survives,
stands apart indeed, wielding a power which the whole pack of infuriated
wolves thirsting for his blood are too cowardly to challenge. The
Girondists and the Extremists have fallen. Hébert, the idol of the mob,
Danton, its hero and its mouthpiece, have been hurled from their throne,
sent to the scaffold along with ci-devant nobles, aristocrats, royalists
and traitors. But this one man remains, calm in the midst of every
storm, absolute in his will, indigent where others have grasped riches
with both hands, adored, almost deified, by a few, dreaded by all,
sphinx-like, invulnerable, sinister--Robespierre!
Robespierre at this time was at the height of his popularity and of his
power. The two great Committees of Public Safety and of General Security
were swayed by his desires, the Clubs worshipped him, the Convention was
packed with obedient slaves to his every word. The Dantonists, cowed
into submission by the bold coup which had sent their leader, their
hero, their idol, to the guillotine, were like a tree that has been
struck at the root. Without Danton, the giant of the Revolution, the
colossus of crime, the maker of the Terror, the thunderbolt of the
Convention, the party was atrophied, robbed of its strength and its
vitality, its last few members hanging, servile and timorous, upon the
great man's lips.
Robespierre was in truth absolute master of France. The man who had
dared to drag his only rival down to the scaffold was beyond the reach
of any attack. By this final act of unparalleled despotism he had
revealed the secrets of his soul, shown himself to be rapacious as well
as self-seeking. Something of his aloofness, of his incorruptibility,
had vanished, yielding to that ever-present and towering ambition which
hitherto none had dared to suspect. But ambition is the one vice to
which the generality of mankind will always accord homage, and
Robespierre, by gaining the victory over his one rival, had virtually
begun to rule, whilst his colleagues in the Convention, in the Clubs and
in the Committees, had tacitly agreed to obey. The tyrant out of his
vaulting ambition had brought forth the slaves.
Faint hearted and servile, they brooded over their wrongs, gazed with
smouldering wrath on Danton's vacant seat in the Convention, which no
one cared to fill. But they did not murmur, hardly dared to plot, and
gave assent to every decree, every measure, every suggestion promulgated
by the dictator who held their lives in the hollow of his thin white
hand; who with a word, a gesture, could send his enemy, his detractor, a
mere critic of his actions, to the guillotine.